Children in Prison WHY THEY ARE THERE?https://childreninprison.wordpress.com
my heart beats for children - they need love and education firstWed, 14 Feb 2018 20:23:37 +0000enhourly1http://wordpress.com/https://secure.gravatar.com/blavatar/4859c02b535632b5c4e1850af7d1ce6d?s=96&d=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.wp.com%2Fi%2Fbuttonw-com.pngChildren in Prison WHY THEY ARE THERE?https://childreninprison.wordpress.com
A 16-year-old Memphis girl charged with first-degree murder in the killing of a teen boy is being held in pretrial isolation at the Tennessee Prison for Women in Nashville.https://childreninprison.wordpress.com/2018/02/14/a-16-year-old-memphis-girl-charged-with-first-degree-murder-in-the-killing-of-a-teen-boy-is-being-held-in-pretrial-isolation-at-the-tennessee-prison-for-women-in-nashville/
https://childreninprison.wordpress.com/2018/02/14/a-16-year-old-memphis-girl-charged-with-first-degree-murder-in-the-killing-of-a-teen-boy-is-being-held-in-pretrial-isolation-at-the-tennessee-prison-for-women-in-nashville/#respondWed, 14 Feb 2018 20:14:05 +0000http://childreninprison.wordpress.com/?p=6566Meaghan YbosFollow
Co-founder and director, People for the Enforcement of Rape Laws
Feb 13
Tennessee Sheriff: Solitary Confinement for 16 year-old Girl is No Different Than a ‘Private Room’

Chart: ACLU/HRW report “Growing Up Locked Down”
A 16-year-old Memphis girl charged with first-degree murder in the killing of a teen boy is being held in pretrial isolation at the Tennessee Prison for Women in Nashville.

Tennessee Prison for Women. (Photo: tn.gov)
The Shelby County District Attorney’s office charged her as an adult in the April 3, 2017 shooting death of 17-year-old Deago Brown. She was just 15 when she was arrested and then transferred to the adult women’s prison.
A spokesperson for Shelby County Sheriff Bill Oldham’s office said the county sent her to the prison, which is 200 miles away from her home and family, because local facilities don’t have a secure place for her.
As the only inmate there under 18 years of age, however, she has spent the last four months alone inside of a cell the size of a walk-in closet, according to attorney Josh Spickler, the director of Just City, a criminal justice reform advocacy group. She has no contact with other prisoners. She is allowed 30 minutes three times a week to shower, with her hands and feet shackled each time she leaves her cell.
“A developing brain cannot tolerate this treatment,” Spickler said in a written statement.
“If the Sheriff lacks the facilities and staff to detain girls, he must follow the law and find the nearest sufficient jail,” he wrote. Spickler also noted that a youth facility near Nashville in Davidson County has offered to hold the young woman and provide her supportive services and safety.
The young woman has already spent roughly 131 days in solitary confinement, 101 days longer than the 30-day limit contained in the Army Field Manual for the “separation” of terrorism detainees, which is considered a “restricted” interrogation technique.
Yet in an interview with the Commercial Appeal, Shelby County Sheriff’s Office spokesman Earle Farrell compared her conditions of confinement to a “private room.” Farrell’s claim about solitary confinement is not supported by data.
The devastating and lasting psychiatric effects of solitary confinement have been extensively documented. Solitary confinement is harmful to the mental health of inmates because it restricts social contact, which is a psychological stimulus that humans require to remain healthy and functioning. Prolonged isolation causes anxiety, panic, hallucinations, paranoia, insomnia, aggression, depression, and an increased risk of suicide, especially for people with pre-existing mental health conditions.
For juveniles, whose brains are still developing, solitary confinement is even more brutal, its effects even more enduring.
Compounding the psychiatric effects of isolation, adolescents in solitary confinement “are frequently denied access to treatment, services, and programming adequate to meet their medical, psychological, developmental, and rehabilitative needs,” according to a 2011 report by Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union.
Department of Justice research found that more than half the children in juvenile facilities who committed suicide while detained were in isolated cells.
The United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment both prohibit solitary confinement for juveniles. And several local governments have also eliminated solitary confinement for youth detained in adult correctional facilities.
Speaking earlier this month in support of an American Bar Association measure urging state legislatures to curtail the use of solitary confinement, Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Bernice Donald pointed to the case of Kalief Browder, who was sent to Rikers Island at age 16 under suspicion of stealing a backpack and then spent three years waiting for a trial that never occurred, with two of those years spent in isolation. He attempted suicide several times while in solitary confinement, and tried again in 2013, six months after he left Rikers Island. In 2015, at the age of 22, Browder hung himself.
“Shelby County’s failure to provide a safe, age-appropriate detention setting for a 15-year-old girl is a serious matter,” Spickler told In Justice Today. “To dismiss it and compare isolation like this to a ‘private room’ is appalling. The conditions of this girl’s detention are unacceptable, and everything we know about teenage brain development tells us we are doing irreparable harm.”

]]>https://childreninprison.wordpress.com/2018/02/14/a-16-year-old-memphis-girl-charged-with-first-degree-murder-in-the-killing-of-a-teen-boy-is-being-held-in-pretrial-isolation-at-the-tennessee-prison-for-women-in-nashville/feed/0curi56PETITION: Jane Doe* is 16-years old. She is 200 miles away from her family, isolated in inhumane solitary confinement at the Tennessee Prison for Women. Other than one January meeting with her lawyers, she has not had a visitor since last September. We only have until Wednesday, February 14 to make our voices heard.https://childreninprison.wordpress.com/2018/02/13/jane-doe-is-16-years-old-she-is-200-miles-away-from-her-family-isolated-in-inhumane-solitary-confinement-at-the-tennessee-prison-for-women-other-than-one-january-meeting-with-her-lawyers-she-has/
https://childreninprison.wordpress.com/2018/02/13/jane-doe-is-16-years-old-she-is-200-miles-away-from-her-family-isolated-in-inhumane-solitary-confinement-at-the-tennessee-prison-for-women-other-than-one-january-meeting-with-her-lawyers-she-has/#respondTue, 13 Feb 2018 18:44:15 +0000http://childreninprison.wordpress.com/?p=6561PLEASE SIGN PETITION – SO IMPORTANT! https://www.change.org/p/tell-shelby-county-sheriff-free-16-year-old-girl-from-inhumane-solitary-confinement-now

‎13‎. ‎Feb um ‎10‎:‎03

Jane Doe* is 16-years old. She is 200 miles away from her family, isolated in inhumane solitary confinement at the Tennessee Prison for Women. Other than one January meeting with her lawyers, she has not had a visitor since last September. We only have until Wednesday, February 14 to make our voices heard.

For more than four months, she has been in solitary confinement – locked in a small cell without human contact, despite the fact she has not gone to trial and no judge or jury has convicted her. Her parents are not able to visit. Her room is the size of a closet.

Shelby County, the jurisdiction that arrested Jane Doe, accommodates male youth being tried as if they were adults in youth facilities, but repeatedly transfers female youth to facilities designed for adults. When Sheriff Bill Oldham sends female youth to adult prison facilities, they are more likely to be held in solitary confinement.

Like all teenagers, Jane Doe is not safe in solitary. Solitary confinement is dangerous for kids, having devastating effects including trauma, psychosis, and increased risk of suicide. Solitary deprives kids of critical supports they need to get better. It makes facilities, staff, and youth less safe.

A youth facility in Nashville is able and willing to accommodate Jane Doe safely and securely without the use of solitary. Yet, Sheriff Oldham refuses to move her and so she continues to sit in isolation in an adult facility.

On Wednesday, February 14th during Jane Doe’s arraignment, a judge can decide to move Jane Doe out of solitary to a secure youth facility. Anything less than a decision to move her would be inhumane.

Tell Sheriff Oldham it is time to move Jane Doe.*Disclaimer: The name of the young person has been changed to Jane Doe to protect her identity.Diese Petition wird versendet an:Shelby County Mayor’s OfficeShelby County Mayor Mark LuttrellShelby County Mayor’s Chief Administrative OfficerHarvey KennedyShelby County Sheriff’s Office Chief Policy & Statutory Compliance OfficerDebra Fessenden

Please help Jane Doe*, a 16 year old girl who has been held in solitary confinement in an adult prison in Tennessee since October. Other than one January meeting with her lawyers, she has not had a visitor since last September. The sheriff refuses to move her to an age-appropriate youth facility that is ready and willing to take her.

Please sign and circulate this petition to tell Sheriff Oldham it is time to move Jane Doe. *Disclaimer: The name of the young person has been changed to Jane Doe to protect her identity.

Feel free to use the social media posts below and graphics here along with the below posts.

Facebook:Take action to free Tennessee girl from solitary confinement by signing this petition and demanding the Shelby County Sheriff and Shelby County Mayor to release her immediately. http://bit.ly/2C68eh5

]]>https://childreninprison.wordpress.com/2018/02/13/jane-doe-is-16-years-old-she-is-200-miles-away-from-her-family-isolated-in-inhumane-solitary-confinement-at-the-tennessee-prison-for-women-other-than-one-january-meeting-with-her-lawyers-she-has/feed/0curi56AMBER WAS ONLY 16 Y.O: – PERHAPS A CHILD, STILL A CHILD: AND NOW A PLEA, A PETITION FOR AMBER:Petition richtet sich an Governor Of California Governor Edmund Brown Please Help Amber Riley Come Home Earleen Austin Colton, CAhttps://childreninprison.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/amber-was-only-16-y-o-perhaps-a-child-still-a-child-and-now-a-plea-a-petition-for-amberpetition-richtet-sich-an-governor-of-california-governor-edmund-brown-please-help-amber-riley-come-home-ea/
https://childreninprison.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/amber-was-only-16-y-o-perhaps-a-child-still-a-child-and-now-a-plea-a-petition-for-amberpetition-richtet-sich-an-governor-of-california-governor-edmund-brown-please-help-amber-riley-come-home-ea/#respondSat, 03 Feb 2018 18:21:31 +0000http://childreninprison.wordpress.com/?p=6554

PLEASE SIGN THIS PETITION! ONLY 86 SIGNED THIS SO IMPORTANT LETTER TO GOV. EDMUND BROWN TO LET AMBER GO HOME, AFTER SO MANY YEARS IN PRISON

THANK YOU!

Amber has been locked up for 15 long years. She was only 16. She has been recommended for a Commutation by the prison staff at CCWF. Please help her by asking Gov. Brown to let her come home.She has a perfect record since going to prison. She has earned a GED,and has almost completed a AA degree in Social & Behavioral Studies as well as a Certificate in Business. She is currently helping to train & raise Service Dogs for the Mentally & Physically Disabled through a program called Little Angels Service Dogs. She is also a Mentor in the New Youth Diversion Program working with at risk youth,teen age girls/to help them make better decisions. Amber would like to continue working with at Risk Youth upon her release. She has at least 10 years to serve before even being considered for parole & the Governor has the ability to change her sentence to what he sees fit. She asks that you please sign this petition of support for a earlier release . She is aware she is not entitled to anything she is only asking for a chance to experience life as a free adult. You can read about Amber’s case & trial at>>>http://rileyj240.blogspot.com/search/label/Amber%20Riley%3A%20An%20Unjust%20Verdict>You can also write to her if you wish: Email Gellybean1974@yahoo.com for her address:>> Visit Amber’s Blog: https://amberj240.blogspot.com

Amber has been locked up for 15 long years. She was only 16. She has been recommended for a Commutation by the prison staff at CCWF. Please help her by asking Gov. Brown to let her come home.She has a perfect record since going to prison. She has earned a GED,and has almost completed a AA degree in Social & Behavioral Studies as well as a Certificate in Business. She is currently helping to train & raise Service Dogs for the Mentally & Physically Disabled through a program called Little Angels Service Dogs. She is also a Mentor in the New Youth Diversion Program working with at risk youth,teen age girls/to help them make better decisions. Amber would like to continue working with at Risk Youth upon her release. She has at least 10 years to serve before even being considered for parole & the Governor has the ability to change her sentence to what he sees fit. She asks that you please sign this petition of support for a earlier release . She is aware she is not entitled to anything she is only asking for a chance to experience life as a free adult. You can read about Amber’s case & trial at>>>http://rileyj240.blogspot.com/search/label/Amber%20Riley%3A%20An%20Unjust%20Verdict>You can also write to her if you wish: Email Gellybean1974@yahoo.com for her address:>> Visit Amber’s Blog: https://amberj240.blogspot.com

My name is Amber R riley and I was arrested for murder at the age of 16.It has been 15 years ago that I was charged as an adult & sentenced to 26 ToLife.I had not been in trouble before this nor have I sence.I have a good reort with staff & my peers. I have spent the last 16 years away from my family, my mom & dad whom I love very much & need to be with as they are elderly now & not in the best of health.I have worked on my education all these years obtaing my GED & I have almost completed my AA degree in Social and Behavioral studies as well as a Certificatein Business. I have worked to better myself through peer groups for myself & others by mentoring the younger inmates charged as adults. I am currently training rescue dogs for mentally & physically disabled through a program called Little Angels Service Dogs & this coming week will mentor to my first Juvenile from the New Youth Diverson Program where I hope to make a difference in Teenagers decisions they make & hopefully help them from making bad choices that could lead them to prision.>4 Laudatory Chronos signed by my the correctional Leiutentants to commend me for a positive attitude towards both staff & my peers. The Chrono Reads>This CDC 12&B is being submitted in order to commend Inmate Amber Riley #WA3123for her positive programming efforts. I have known inmate Riley for 4 years since she transfored from VSPW. She continuously displays a confident and positive attitude.Inmate Riley is always respectful towards staff and has not received any RVR’S while being housed at Central California Women’s Facility .I have also observed that she is liked & respected by her peers. She contributes to the facilities programming atmosphere and is constantly seeking to better herself in order to prepare her transition into the community. I think Inmate Riley should be commended for her hard work and personal achievements. It should be noted that Inmate Riley reports to work,ducats, and other activities in which she is involved,punctually and enthusiastically.Signed: J.Pimentel Correctional LieutenantMay 9/2016:———————7/7/2017Correctional Officer M. ShabbarThis CDC 128-B is being Submitted on Behalf of Inmate Riley #WA3123.I have been able to supervise Inmate Riley since 2017, in the building as one one of her job supervisors (Building 703/”A” Yard Program Office where Inmate Riley is assigned Facility “A” Lieutenants Clerk. Inmate Riley maintains a positive and respectful attitude staff & peers. Riley abides bt the rules and regulations. I have never seen Inmate Riley behave in a negative or disruptive manner, and therefore should be commended for the character she consistently presents to the prison community.Signed: Facility “A: Third WatchM. Shabbar, Correctional Officer.7/7/2017————————–128-B Chrono /8/18/2017E-File/ Laudatory/Informational ChronoSigned: Relief OfficerC.Celestin, Correctional Officer

The purpose of this 128-B Chrono is to commend Inmate Riley #WA3123.I have observed Inmate Riley’s good report with the staff and her peers, despite all the different attitudes within the institutional environment.Inmate Riley is always consistent with her attitude & behavior.he also practices integrity. She stays focused and committed to being herself. Inmate Riley has participated in some of our self help groups,she is learning skills to take with her when released.Inmate Riley should be commended for having a good outlook on life and for her behavior and the progress she has attained regarding her personal growth.

From Inside Rikers Island, a Harrowing Look at the Torture of Solitary Confinement Posted by curi56 on November 6, 2017

From Inside Rikers Island, a Harrowing Look at the Torture of Solitary Confinement Hannah K. Gold October 3 2015, 2:21 p.m.Within any brutal and isolated institution, new language tends to form, like scar tissue.

In the 1990s, Rikers Island — New York City’s largest jail, encircled by the East River—was no exception. Corrections officers, mental health workers, and administrators had a special name for inmates in solitary confinement whom they believed faked suicidal tendencies in order to be placed under mental observation:

“Bing Monsters.” “Bing,” a common word on the inside for solitary confinement, evokes the feeling of a brain clouding and sanity suddenly snapping — bing! “Monster” because for many jail staffers there was nothing worse than a malingering inmate who used up precious prison resources by feigning madness.

In her new memoir, Lockdown on Rikers, Mary Buser recounts how, during a decade-long career in health care at Rikers Island, she went from a chipper, idealistic mental health counselor to a disillusioned administrator (always with a cigarette handy in the later days). Her professional stint at the jail began in 1991 as a part-time intern, while she was a graduate student at Columbia University’s School for Social Work, and ended with her practically running the mental health department of the Otis Bantum Correctional Center, the complex that houses Rikers’ Punitive Segregation Unit. Throughout her plainspoken, harrowing memoir Buser is sensitive to how word choice can mask and manage the horrors of prison life, and of solitary confinement in particular. Her linguistic flexibility was, after all, a talent she was selected for as a counselor, the ability to make a potentially life-changing connection with every inmate she encountered. But by the end of her time at Rikers words like “rehabilitate” and “therapy” lose out to “stabilize” and “contain.”

Buser’s memoir demonstrates how mental health workers, supposedly the peaceful, civilian presence in a correctional center, can end up perpetrating institutional violence themselves. Even those as conscientious as Buser.

The mid-1990s marked the peak of Rikers’ incarcerated population, when the complex held some 24,000 inmates. This swell in the non-violent prison population was part of a national crusade against drug offenders. In New York, the 1973 Rockefeller drug laws introduced dramatic mandatory minimums (15 years to life for being caught trafficking as little as 4 ounces of drugs). These weren’t scaled down until the Drug Law Reform Act of 2004 — even then, mandatory sentences for crimes of the same stature were eight to 20 years. Buser witnessed how the famed “drug sweeps” got low-level drug traffickers, many of them women, mired in the criminal justice system for decades. The mid-to-late 1990s was also the heyday of then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s tough-on-crime strategies that choked the city’s jails. His portrait hung in the lobby at Otis Bantum.

Buser refers to most of these prisoners as “detainees” since Rikers Island is, then as now, largely a holding center for people who are awaiting trial but can’t make bail or have been remanded to custody. Of course most of these cases never make it to trial, resulting in plea bargains instead. Today, though the jail’s total population is about half what it was in Buser’s time, little else about it has changed — 90 percent of inmates at Rikers Island are black or Latino; about 85 percent have not been convicted of a crime; 40 percent have been diagnosed with a mental illness. And no part of the jail is more brutal than the solitary confinement units. “I can’t help but feel that [solitary confinement] has all the earmarks of torture,” Buser muses. In this particular scene she’s reacting to the case of inmate Troy Jackson, who’s beaten his head bloody against his cell wall. Buser can see clear to his skull. Her orders as mental health administrator are to keep him alive and keep other inmates from duplicating his actions, nothing more. “When you call someone a monster, or a skel, or a body, then it suddenly becomes okay to do whatever you want to them because they’re not really human beings,” Buser writes. This is how you get doctor-certified torture at a black site just a land-bridge away from one of the wealthiest cities in the country. First “people” become “bodies” then “torture” becomes “segregation.” The dirty secret is locked behind a wall of semantics. Buser’s anecdotes from Rikers, where few stories ever get out to the general public, are much needed today.

Two years ago the U.N. published a report by its Special Rapporteur on Torture, stating that solitary confinement of 15 days or more is torture. Between 2007 and 2013, the number of solitary confinement cells in Rikers increased by 60 percent. In 2014 the stories of Kalief Browder, who began three years at Rikers, much of it in solitary, at the age of 16, only to have all charges against him dropped, and Jerome Murdough, a homeless veteran who baked to death in one of the jail’s mental health units, brought fresh attention to harsh confinement conditions. In April 2014, Mayor Bill de Blasio hired a new Department of Corrections commissioner, Joseph Ponte, a veteran of private prison administration who has been touted by the government and media alike as a proven criminal justice “reformer.” Ponte vowed to “end the culture of excessive solitary confinement.” Integral to his plan was the construction of a new Enhanced Security Housing unit, which he was adamant would be a non-punitive, “therapeutic” alternative to solitary confinement. Yet two months after the ESH unit opened in February, the Board of Corrections released its first report—and it was scathing, noting that there had been several violent incidents and that many inmates felt unsafe. “Several ESH inmates have expressed to BOC staff they prefer being confined in punitive segregation than being housed in ESH,” the report reads. “They know that a punitive segregation sentence is for a fixed period of time; the duration of a stay in ESH is uncertain.” Dostoevsky famously wrote that

August 17, 2017Sentenced to Life Without Parole As a Juvenile: Greg Oates | Age 58

By Richard Ross

For more than a decade I have interviewed more than 1,000 kids in 35 states. What of these kids who were sentenced to long sentences and JLWOP, life sentences without parole? These kids become adults who become geriatric. These are the people I have interviewed for the past year.
These are their stories.

There are more than 2,000 people — juveniles serving life without parole all over the country.

These are some of their voices.

These are their faces:
…

]]>https://childreninprison.wordpress.com/2017/11/28/richard-ross-stories-from-juveline-sentenced-to-life-without-parole-like-greg-oates-now-58-y-o-uju/feed/0curi56Rape Is Rampant in Juvenile Justice System and Most Often Perpetrated by Staffhttps://childreninprison.wordpress.com/2017/11/28/rape-is-rampant-in-juvenile-justice-system-and-most-often-perpetrated-by-staff/
https://childreninprison.wordpress.com/2017/11/28/rape-is-rampant-in-juvenile-justice-system-and-most-often-perpetrated-by-staff/#respondTue, 28 Nov 2017 10:48:00 +0000http://childreninprison.wordpress.com/?p=6527

Shocking: Rape Is Rampant in Juvenile Justice System and Most Often Perpetrated by Staff

Published: June 6, 2013
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Source: AlterNet – Blacklistednews

Hundreds of teen-agers are raped or sexually assaulted during their stays in the country’s juvenile detention facilities, and many of them are victimized repeatedly, according to a U.S. Department of Justice survey.
The teens are most often assaulted by staff members working at the facilities, and fully 20 percent of those victimized by the men and women charged with protecting and counseling them said they had been violated on more than 10 occasions.
“Today’s report illustrates the fundamental failure of many juvenile detention facilities to keep their youth safe,” said Louisa Stannow, executive director of Just Detention International, a California-based health and human rights organization.
The Justice Department survey — covering both secure juvenile detention facilities and group homes, the less restrictive settings into which troubled youngsters are often ordered — involved more than 8,500 boys and girls. In all, 1,720 of those surveyed reported being sexually assaulted.

Allen Beck, the author of the report, said that the rates of staff-on-inmate abuse among juveniles are “about three times higher than what we find in the adult arena.”
The highest incidence of staff sexual misconduct occurred in Ohio, South Carolina, Georgia and Illinois, while other states like New York, Massachusetts and Delaware, reported no abuse. At the Paulding Regional Youth Detention Center in Georgia and the Circleville Juvenile Correctional Facility in Ohio, one in three youngsters surveyed said they’d suffered sexual abuse at the hands of staff members.
Stannow said the findings “show clearly that it is possible to protect young detainees from the devastation of sexual abuse,” but that they also “make painfully clear that many youth facilities have a very, very long way to go.”

There are roughly 70,000 youngsters in the country’s juvenile detention facilities, thousands of them 16 years old or younger. The survey examined facilities that house roughly a third of the total population in detention. The report gives some insight into how staff members victimize the youngsters under their care and supervision. In the majority of cases, the survey found, staff members establish a personal relationship with the inmate first by sharing details of their personal lives, sharing pictures, or giving gifts. The report indicates that one instance of abuse usually leads to more.

Larry Vanderbilt, general counsel for the Department of Juvenile Justice in South Carolina, which ranks second in states with the highest reported rates of staff abuse, attributed a large part of the problem to one particular guard at its Birchwood juvenile detention center. He said the guard had been linked to at least two incidents of sex abuse and is now being criminally prosecuted.
The report will be shared with the Justice Department’s Review Panel on Prison Rape, which will eventually invite administrators with the highest and lowest sex abuse rates to testify at hearings in Washington.

]]>https://childreninprison.wordpress.com/2017/11/28/rape-is-rampant-in-juvenile-justice-system-and-most-often-perpetrated-by-staff/feed/0curi56‘Shocking failures’: NT royal commission calls for closure of Don Dale Commissioners uphold allegations of abuse in Darwin’s youth detention system and say the law is being ignoredhttps://childreninprison.wordpress.com/2017/11/28/shocking-failures-nt-royal-commission-calls-for-closure-of-don-dale-commissioners-uphold-allegations-of-abuse-in-darwins-youth-detention-system-and-say-the-law-is-being-ignored/
https://childreninprison.wordpress.com/2017/11/28/shocking-failures-nt-royal-commission-calls-for-closure-of-don-dale-commissioners-uphold-allegations-of-abuse-in-darwins-youth-detention-system-and-say-the-law-is-being-ignored/#respondTue, 28 Nov 2017 10:31:39 +0000http://childreninprison.wordpress.com/?p=6523‘Shocking failures’: NT royal commission calls for closure of Don Dale
Commissioners uphold allegations of abuse in Darwin’s youth detention system and say the law is being ignored

@heldavidson
Friday 17 November 2017 01.34 GMT
Last modified on Friday 17 November 2017 04.40 GMT
The Don Dale juvenile detention centre must close, and its high security unit should shut down immediately, the Northern Territory royal commission into the protection and detention of children has recommended.
The inquiry’s final report, released on Friday, found “shocking and systemic failures” over many years that were known about but ignored at the highest levels, commissioners Margaret White and Mick Gooda said.
“The procedures and requirements of the law have simply not been followed in many instances. The systems failed to comply with the basic binding human rights standards in the treatment of children and young people,” the report said.
It upheld shocking allegations raised during the 12 weeks of public hearings, including verbal abuse, physical control, inappropriate force and restraint, and the bribing or daring of children to carry out humiliating or degrading acts, or to commit violence against one another.
“Children and young people were subjected to regular, repeated and distressing mistreatment in detention and there was a failure to follow the procedures and requirements of the law in many instances,” the commissioners said.
“These things happened on our watch, in our country, to our children.”
The commission revealed it had referred a number of matters to police, including potential criminal conduct by youth justice officers, the harassment or threatening of witnesses or potential witnesses, and the physical, sexual and neglectful abuse of children in out-of-home residential care settings.
We must stop punishing children for a disadvantaged start in life
Alison Elliott
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The NT government has three months to deliver a plan for closing Don Dale – a widely criticised centre that previously housed maximum security adult prisoners until they were transferred because it was no longer suitable for habitation. The isolated high security unit cells should be closed immediately, the report said, describing them as:“wholly inappropriate, oppressive, prison-like environment that is detrimental to [the] health, wellbeing and prospects of rehabilitation” of detainees.
Among more than 230 recommendations the commission called for:
The age of criminal responsibility to be raised to 12 and the detention of under-14s to be banned except for serious crimes.
A commissioner for children and young people to be given free access to detention centres and detainees.
The use of force to maintain “good order” and any use of teargas to be banned.
Policies of isolation, bail, body searches and transfers to be overhauled.
Recommendations for the child protection sector included:
The development of a 10-year generational strategy for children and families.
The establishment of a network of at least 20 family support centres across the NT.
The phasing out of purchased home-based care and vast improvements to out-of-home care.
Working with Aboriginal organisations to achieve an increase in kinship care placements for Indigenous children.
There are currently 35 children in Don Dale, including 23 on remand and six who are under the age of 14.
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The four-volume report of more than 2,100 pages detailed a litany of failures and errors, as well as potential and actual breaches of law and international human rights standards. It targeted every level of authority, including police and executives, and ministers from the Labor and CLP governments.
“Senior executives and the management and staff at the detention centres implemented and/or maintained and/or tolerated a detention system seemingly intent on ‘breaking’ rather than ‘rehabilitating’ the children and young people in their care,” it said.
The absence of up-to-date standard operating procedures was attributed to the former corrections commissioner Ken Middlebrook and, for a limited period, Salli Cohen.

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Frequent understaffing from 2010 resulted in officers – who, the report noted, had minimal or no training – being overworked “with potentially dangerous consequences”.
It made specific findings against individual guards, including Conan Zamolo, who filmed detainees inappropriately on at least three occasions and “likely made a recording of a detainee while he was in the shower”, Derek Tasker, who “put his hand or hands around the throat of detainees on three occasions”, and Trevor Hansen, who used the “wedgie” restraint technique against children.
The recommendations also appeared to address concerns raised by the former NT justice minister John Elferink about male circumcision, calling for a forum of boys, advocates, elders and leaders to review any ceremonial practice which affected the health of boys.
The findings and recommendations come at the end of a 10-month royal commission into the protection and detention of children in the Northern Territory. It acknowledged the “profound shift” it was proposing for NT authorities, but said it was necessary given the system to date had continued to “simply fail the entire community”.
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“The time for tinkering around the edges and ignoring the conclusions of the myriad of inquiries that have already been conducted must come to an end.
“What we have found is disturbing on many levels, not least of course because it has occurred on our watch and in our count,” White and Gooda said on the eve of the report’s release.
The royal commission uncovered deep-seated and confronting problems in Australia “that come at an enormous human and financial cost,” they said.
“Neither will be sustainable for the NT in the short term.”
White and Gooda said their recommended changes to the youth justice and detention system would deliver savings of $335.5m by 2027.
Conversely, “doing nothing” would result in last financial year’s costs of $37.3m increasing to $113.4m by 2027. The main driver of that cost blowout would be to continue using existing facilities, they said.
NT chief minister Michael Gunner said the report was a story of the NT government’s failure to care about and protect children who needed it most.

“It will live as a stain on the Northern Territory reputation,” he said in a speech on Friday morning. “For this I am sorry. But more than this I’m sorry for the stories that live in the children we failed.”
He said the government had received the report only that morning and needed time to consider it, but he believed it shared “the same vision”. He said the government had already begun improvements with its sweeping justice reforms and housing package.
In its report the commission said many of the reforms were positive, but there continued to be “troubling incidents still occurring” in NT detention centres.
The royal commission was called after the ABC broadcast disturbing footage from inside the Don Dale detention centre and Darwin adult prison, of children being mistreated, beaten, restrained, and teargassed. It brought long running concerns to Canberra.
The commission received more than 480 witness statements, more than 320 submissions and heard from more than 210 witnesses in 12 weeks of public hearings.
Bureaucratic witnesses described a failed system that could not keep up with the volume of child protection reports, could not guarantee protection of those children, and at times covered things up.
Corrections witnesses revealed a detention system without sense or accountability. Guards were inadequately trained and got away with abhorrent alleged acts.
Juvenile witnesses – all of whom with the exception of Dylan Voller testified in private – spoke of the upbringing and poor decisions that landed them in detention, the horrors they endured there and what needed to change.
Ministerial witnesses described challenges trying to fix a broken system without cabinet support, of taking the initiative themselves without expertise of their own or seeking advice from others. Elferink remains unapologetic. The former chief minister Adam Giles recalled nothing.
Even after the hearings ended, shocking allegations and evidence continued to be presented by sector workers and advocacy bodies…

This is Crazy: Criminalizing Mental HealthAmerica is “treating” mental illness through incarceration – and the price we are paying both in dollars and human capital is enormous. This is Crazy: Criminalizing Mental Health is our latest three-part series focusing on the problems with criminalizing mental health told through first-hand accounts. Part one shows what happens when police are not properly trained to deal with people with mental illness.
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From Inside Rikers Island, a Harrowing Look at the Torture of Solitary Confinement
Posted by curi56 on November 6, 2017
From Inside Rikers Island, a Harrowing Look at the Torture of Solitary Confinement
Hannah K. Gold
October 3 2015, 2:21 p.m.
Photo: Seth Wenig/AP

Within any brutal and isolated institution, new language tends to form, like scar tissue. In the 1990s, Rikers Island — New York City’s largest jail, encircled by the East River—was no exception. Corrections officers, mental health workers, and administrators had a special name for inmates in solitary confinement whom they believed faked suicidal tendencies in order to be placed under mental observation: “bing monsters.” “Bing,” a common word on the inside for solitary confinement, evokes the feeling of a brain clouding and sanity suddenly snapping — bing! “Monster” because for many jail staffers there was nothing worse than a malingering inmate who used up precious prison resources by feigning madness.
In her new memoir, Lockdown on Rikers, Mary Buser recounts how, during a decade-long career in health care at Rikers Island, she went from a chipper, idealistic mental health counselor to a disillusioned administrator (always with a cigarette handy in the later days). Her professional stint at the jail began in 1991 as a part-time intern, while she was a graduate student at Columbia University’s School for Social Work, and ended with her practically running the mental health department of the Otis Bantum Correctional Center, the complex that houses Rikers’ Punitive Segregation Unit.
Throughout her plainspoken, harrowing memoir Buser is sensitive to how word choice can mask and manage the horrors of prison life, and of solitary confinement in particular. Her linguistic flexibility was, after all, a talent she was selected for as a counselor, the ability to make a potentially life-changing connection with every inmate she encountered. But by the end of her time at Rikers words like “rehabilitate” and “therapy” lose out to “stabilize” and “contain.” Buser’s memoir demonstrates how mental health workers, supposedly the peaceful, civilian presence in a correctional center, can end up perpetrating institutional violence themselves. Even those as conscientious as Buser.
The mid-1990s marked the peak of Rikers’ incarcerated population, when the complex held some 24,000 inmates. This swell in the non-violent prison population was part of a national crusade against drug offenders. In New York, the 1973 Rockefeller drug laws introduced dramatic mandatory minimums (15 years to life for being caught trafficking as little as 4 ounces of drugs). These weren’t scaled down until the Drug Law Reform Act of 2004 — even then, mandatory sentences for crimes of the same stature were eight to 20 years. Buser witnessed how the famed “drug sweeps” got low-level drug traffickers, many of them women, mired in the criminal justice system for decades. The mid-to-late 1990s was also the heyday of then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s tough-on-crime strategies that choked the city’s jails. His portrait hung in the lobby at Otis Bantum.

Buser refers to most of these prisoners as “detainees” since Rikers Island is, then as now, largely a holding center for people who are awaiting trial but can’t make bail or have been remanded to custody. Of course most of these cases never make it to trial, resulting in plea bargains instead. Today, though the jail’s total population is about half what it was in Buser’s time, little else about it has changed — 90 percent of inmates at Rikers Island are black or Latino; about 85 percent have not been convicted of a crime; 40 percent have been diagnosed with a mental illness.

And no part of the jail is more brutal than the solitary confinement units.
“I can’t help but feel that [solitary confinement] has all the earmarks of torture,” Buser muses.
In this particular scene she’s reacting to the case of inmate Troy Jackson, who’s beaten his head bloody against his cell wall. Buser can see clear to his skull. Her orders as mental health administrator are to keep him alive and keep other inmates from duplicating his actions, nothing more.
“When you call someone a monster, or a skel, or a body, then it suddenly becomes okay to do whatever you want to them because they’re not really human beings,” Buser writes. This is how you get doctor-certified torture at a black site just a land-bridge away from one of the wealthiest cities in the country. First “people” become “bodies” then “torture” becomes “segregation.” The dirty secret is locked behind a wall of semantics.
Buser’s anecdotes from Rikers, where few stories ever get out to the general public, are much needed today. Two years ago the U.N. published a report by its Special Rapporteur on Torture, stating that solitary confinement of 15 days or more is torture. Between 2007 and 2013, the number of solitary confinement cells in Rikers increased by 60 percent. In 2014 the stories of Kalief Browder, who began three years at Rikers, much of it in solitary, at the age of 16, only to have all charges against him dropped, and Jerome Murdough, a homeless veteran who baked to death in one of the jail’s mental health units, brought fresh attention to harsh confinement conditions.
In April 2014, Mayor Bill de Blasio hired a new Department of Corrections commissioner, Joseph Ponte, a veteran of private prison administration who has been touted by the government and media alike as a proven criminal justice “reformer.” Ponte vowed to “end the culture of excessive solitary confinement.” Integral to his plan was the construction of a new Enhanced Security Housing unit, which he was adamant would be a non-punitive, “therapeutic” alternative to solitary confinement.
Yet two months after the ESH unit opened in February, the Board of Corrections released its first report—and it was scathing, noting that there had been several violent incidents and that many inmates felt unsafe. “Several ESH inmates have expressed to BOC staff they prefer being confined in punitive segregation than being housed in ESH,” the report reads. “They know that a punitive segregation sentence is for a fixed period of time; the duration of a stay in ESH is uncertain.”
Dostoevsky famously wrote that “A society can be judged by the condition of its jails.” This proverb, Buser notes, is inscribed above the entryway to the George Motchan Detention Center, one of the largest of Rikers Island’s jails. In a way, it’s the perfect institutional phrase, morally compelling yet sanitized of standards. It’s a potentially radical message, at least in America: Jails aren’t the social exception, they are the social rule. When a jail as depraved as Rikers openly proclaims this, it doesn’t realize or can’t admit how sick it really is.
Hannah K. Gold is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer.
Caption: The door of an EHS unit inside Rikers Island in New York, Thursday, March 12, 2015.https://theintercept.com/2015/10/03/from-inside-rikers-island-a-harrowing-look-at-the-torture-of-solitary-confinement/?utm_content=buffer5b52c&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer